Praising Russia's persecution of its LGBTQ community backfires on Franklin Graham

Franklin Graham

Poor Franklin Graham. To hear him and his religious right cohorts (such as the Family Research Council) tell it, he has become a "victim" of anti-Christian persecution.

Rev. Franklin Graham is headed to England in September -- but the British may be the last to know now that his ads have been pulled off area busses. Of course, nothing about the signs were offensive, unless you consider "hope" to be. And based on the response of local LGBT activists, they do. 

Blackpool Transport, the double-decker bus line that was slated to promote Franklin's event, pulled out of the deal after some members of the community complained. "The removal of these adverts is as a result of us listening and acting on customer and public feedback, which we aim to do at all time," said the company manager. Interestingly enough, nothing about the banners had anything to do with social issues or even overtly Christian. The message was simply this: "Time for Hope." 

Franklin, who's had a front-row seat for the censorship of religion in the U.S., wasn't surprised. On his Facebook page, he talked about his festival and the obvious need for it around the world. 

"I'm sorry that some see hope as offensive, but I can assure you that tens of thousands of people in Blackpool and across the United Kingdom are searching for hope. Sex, drugs, money, even religion -- none of these are the answer. I'm coming to share with everyone in Blackpool, Lancashire, and across North West England that there is One who can give you hope. Hope for today, hope for tomorrow, and hope for eternity. His name is Jesus Christ! Will you pray with me for this event in September and for God to work in a mighty way to transform hearts and lives across this region?" 

Poor baby. However, according to other sources, both Graham and FRC omitted some details.

'Federal judge rules against anti-gay adoption agency' & other Mon midday news briefs

Religious-based groups fulfilling whatever service have every right to believe that my sexual orientation is evil and makes me a sinner. But I'll be damned if I am going to freely hand them my tax money to endorse that belief.

Federal judge sides with Philadelphia against anti-gay adoption agency - You had better believe it! If the religious right wants to fight on the hill of justifying agencies which discriminate against LGBTQs getting gay tax dollars, I would be happy to accommodate them. It's like I said in another blog post - "Religious-based groups fulfilling whatever service have every right to believe that my sexual orientation is evil and makes me a sinner. But I'll be damned if I am going to freely hand them my tax money to endorse that belief." 

Democrats introduce a bill to ban the gay & trans panic defense - About time, too.

HRC trolls Trump in Helsinki before Putin meeting - We haven't forgotten about Chechnya. 

How the LGBTQ rights movement in India gained momentum - This is wonderful! More power to you, my brothers and sisters!

Online attempts to connect LGBT equality with pedophilia are vicious hoaxes

This flyer is part of a vicious lie

Lies created to denigrate groups of people never really go away. They become phrased differently and continuously repeated.  African-Americans have to deal with it concerning issues of crime and violence.

And the LGBT community has to deal with the awful lie that most of us are pedophiles. Over the years, we've repeatedly refuted this lie. Unfortunately we have to continue that fight even in 2018

 According to the site Resisting Hate:

It has come to our attention recently that a group of people are using social media to try and undermine the LGBT movement by claiming to be part of a wider “LGBTP” group. The P (they claim) stands for Paedophilia and the group put out messages campaigning for the ‘rights of paedophiles to find love with children’. They make inflammatory comments about paedophiles having the right to actualise their love and make ludicrous comparisons between paedophiles and homosexuals. 

This is of course absolute nonsense and has nothing to do with the genuine LGBT community who are certainly not campainging for the rights of paedophiles. No credible LGBT group of whom we know have any intention at all of adding a ‘P’ to promote paedophile rights. This is nothing more than an attempt to discredit the good work of pro LGBT activists who fight for equal rights and education for the gay and transgender communities. 

(There are some groups who use a ‘P’ to support the pansexual community. Pansexuals find love indiscriminative of gender or gender identity. They are nothing at all to do with paedophiles. Groups using the P for this purpose are perfectly legitimate).

The investigation site Snopes dug deeper and discovered that there seems to be a legitimate plan to connect the LGBT community with pedophilia, One attempt involved a fraudulent flyer/poster (see flyer/poster above):

 This fraudulent poster seems to be the work of a 4chan misinformation campaign that began with a 23 June 2016 thread about tricking LGBT activists into supporting pedophiles. These “PsyOps” campaigns are usually aimed at tricking (“redpilling”) people into seeing “reality.” Several users chimed in with their ideas of how to make and promote the poster, which originally included the tagline “Love Is Ageless

And apparently, this isn't the only subversive attempt to undermine the LGBTQ community by connecting us with pedophilia.

Trump supporter Franklin Graham condemns Jimmy Carter's support of LGBT community' & other Fri midday news briefs

Franklin Graham has no grounds to condemn gays

Pro-Trump evangelist Franklin Graham slams Jimmy Carter by saying God will punish gays with fire and death - So old big mouth fake-ass Franklin Graham slams a 2015 pro-gay comment by former president Jimmy Carter. And he did so by bring up Sodom and Gomorrah. Well let me put it this way. Jesus once said "how can you point out the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a beam in yours." To the same point of fact, I ask Graham "How can you bring up the so-called sodomy of your neighbor when you haven't wiped off the orange stains on your lips which came from  kissing Trump's sinful ass?"

Essays-on-Religious-Exemptions - OMG! This is so awesome and needs more coverage. These are personal stories from Americans about the many ways the religious right ideas of "religious liberty," or using religion as a weapon to discriminate, have negatively affected their lives and put them in danger.

Brett Kavanaugh Doesn’t Have To Reverse Obergefell To Destroy LGBTQ Rights - Something to think about. 

Trans coach boosting visibility for girls’ baseball - Wonderful! 

Gay couple’s son denied Irish passport over DNA rules - This right here is some evil bullshit. 

You don't get to call me a sinner AND help yourself to my gay tax dollars - I'm trying to get this to trend big time because this will be a HUGE issue if it already isn't. Religious-based groups fulfilling whatever service have every right to believe that my sexual orientation is evil and makes me a sinner. But I'll be damned if I am going to freely hand them my tax money to endorse that belief.

You don't get to call me a sinner AND help yourself to my gay tax dollars

For an organization which claims to be about truth, morality, and Christian values, the Family Research Council seems to use a lot of deception and misdirection to get its point across.

Case in point is the situation about a bill in Congress which would give tax dollars to adoption agencies which uses religion to discriminate against gays. The bill would also punish LGBT-friendly states if they tried to pass anti-discrimination laws.

The Family Research Council heavily supports the bill and, in that effort, pushed a heart-tugging story via the right-wing Daily Signal about a young expectant mother, Kelly Clemente,  who supposedly only wanted to give her baby to a family which shared her values.

The article and the video (courtesy of the Heritage Foundation, which also has a hand in creating copy for The Daily Signal. It's all connected, folks) is a definite tearjerker:

Now, 10 years later, she says that being able to handpick her son's family was the greatest comfort she had. So when a movement started to take away that right from moms like her, she couldn't help but speak out. When liberal activists started punishing adoption agencies for making sure kids were placed in homes with matching beliefs, Kelly was horrified. She watched as the dominos started to fall in places like Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and D.C. Suddenly, groups like Bethany and Catholic Charities were being given a choice: start putting children in homes that violate the morals of birth moms like Kelly, pay crushing fines, or shut your doors. 

"I would never tell a gay couple, 'Oh, because you two are in love with each other, and you're not a heterosexual couple, don't even think about adopting a child.' That's not what I'm saying," Kelly explains in Heritage's new video. "What I am saying is that birth mothers have a right to choose." Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee agreed, voting 29-23 to protect the freedom of moms like Kelly. Thanks to adoption champions Reps. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) and Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), the new Labor-HHS spending bill now includes an amendment that says the federal government can't discriminate against faith-based groups if they decide not to provide services like adoption or foster care on religious grounds. The bill also says that if a state or local government is found in violation, HHS will withhold up to 15 percent of the federal child welfare funding from the areas responsible.

Just like the baker Jack Phillips in the Masterpiece cakeshop case, Clemente is allowing herself to be used as a pawn in order the cloud the issue. The issue is not who she picks to adopt her child or where she goes.

The issue is why should gay taxpayers have to give our hard earned money to groups which freely discriminate us. The Family Research Council avoids even bringing this up. The organization throws out another misdirection:

The Democrats, meanwhile, continued cranking out lies about what the amendment really does, insisting that it somehow stops same-sex couples from adopting. Hardly! The same adoption agencies that matched them with kids before this bill will still be matching them with kids after. That's because this debate has never been about banning LGBT adoption -- it's about letting everyone operate by their own set of beliefs.

Since using personal stories in order to control the narrative seems to be the order of the day for the anti-LGBTQ right, allow me to give mine.

Anti-gay groups celebrate & distort bill which weaponizes religion to degrade LGBT taxpayers

As to be expected, anti-LGBT organizations are either cheering

Thank you for your work on the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion amendment, @Robert_Aderholt! https://t.co/OzJoUaf1hI

— FRC (@FRCdc) July 12, 2018

or deliberately distorting a bill which would allow adoption agencies which discriminate against gays to still receive tax dollars and would also punish states which protect the LGBT community from discrimination.

Bill protects adoption agencies that protect children

My post from last night gives more detail about the bill. Please read and share:

House GOP bill would legalize giving tax dollars to anti-LGBT adoption agencies & punish LGBT-friendly states 

But most importantly, the bill gives a clear view of the how the anti-LGBTQ right reduced religion into a weapon against LGBTQ equality and safety in two ways

1. The bill itself weaponizes religion, one particular religion - i.e. conservative evangelical Christianity - to create a legal right to discriminate against the LGBT community. 

2.  The bill deliberately degrades the LGBT community by erasing us as taxpaying American citizens and forces us to pay for services which are denied to us. 

These points need to be repeated not only about this bill but also the entire narrative of "religious liberty" as perverted by groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association.

House GOP bill would legalize giving tax dollars to anti-LGBT adoption agencies & punish LGBT-friendly states

If the House GOP gets its way, this will be the future and gays will be giving up  tax dollars to fund it.

From Dominic Holden at Buzzfeed comes news that House Republicans just advanced an amendment out of committee which would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gays while still helping themselves to gay tax dollars under the guise of "religious liberty."

The House Appropriations Committee advanced the amendment, introduced by Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, that says adoption agencies declining a child welfare service based on “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” could not be punished. 

Specifically, agencies that reject applicants, including gay couples and divorcées, based on religious objections, could not be denied federal funding. Nor could a state deny funding to agencies if it receives federal funding for child welfare services under the Social Security Act. 

Further, the measure would punish LGBT-friendly states. The Department of Health and Human Services would withhold 15% of its annual adoption dispersals from states that don’t meet the same standards for protecting religious adoption groups. States could lose federal adoption funds, for instance, if they ban anti-LGBT discrimination — thereby tilting federal adoption funding toward states that allow religious recusals.

According to Holden's article, the amendment goes in front of the entire House as a part of the federal budget where it could face opposition - or rather HAD BETTER face opposition - from Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Holden also pointed out that Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, who introduced the amendment, sent out the following tweet:

Today my colleagues and I of the @HouseAppropsGOP passed my amendment which prohibits the discrimination of child welfare providers based on religious beliefs or moral convictions.

— Rep. Robert Aderholt (@Robert_Aderholt) July 11, 2018

Conveniently Aderholt failed to address the lack of fairness in making LGBT taxpayers give their hard-earned monies to groups which would freely discriminate against us.

You gotta love those Republicans. They won't do anything to reign in the disaster that is the Trump Administration. They won't do anything about gun control. And they certainly won't do a thing about how the Trump Administration is committing a human rights disaster by stealing migrant children from their parents.

But they will bend over backwards to screw with us.

Y'all probably know what I am going to say, but I will repeat myself anyway.

We told folks that this nonsense about "religious liberty" wasn't just about cakes or flowers at gay weddings.

It's about weaponizing religion, one particular religion - i.e. conservative evangelical Christianity  - to create a legal right to discriminate against the LGBT community.  I hope it makes you angry enough to raise hell to your representatives, friends, and neighbors, and especially to vote in November.